War Games
by f3tid
Summary: Each week was a monochromatic and sedate war game – a dilute prod in his direction from her and a sober quirk of indifferent acknowledgement from him. She hadn't anticipated anything more.


**A/N:** This is my first attempt at a Star Trek piece, but I gave it my best (at four in the morning, granted, but whatever). I've been a massive fan of the series since childhood, but the development of Spock and Uhura's relationship in the Abrams films inspired me to write about it. This is set during the Academy days, by the way. All feedback in any form is appreciated, always.

**Disclaimer:** I do not claim ownership of Star Trek or anything in this body of work that pertains to any of the series' characters, trademarks, and/or established written works. My words, however, are my own.

* * *

Isolated by meters of asphyxiated space, by throngs of crimson clad bodies, a morass of stationary and, foremost, by a confounding void of contact, there they were. Each week was a monochromatic and sedate war game – a dilute prod in his direction from her and a sober quirk of indifferent acknowledgement from him. She hadn't anticipated anything more, but persisted patiently behind a pall of placidity, besot as much in her own imagination as she was with him. A cadet's belongings clangored clumsily from the mouth of her rucksack on unto the floor tiles. His weighty brow cinched briefly in response, though his words did not hinge upon the discord.

He dictated a series of soliloquys by a post-Surakian poet and tragedian from the primly pages of a book perched in the nook between an unfurled thumb and forefinger. The content was decidedly inorganic, Uhura had all but surmised, but most works of the period emanated a dully clinical sapor as opposed to the impassioned ardor of their predecessors. The intent of the lesson transcended the depth of his words alone and instead resided in the texture of his voice, the dance of it as he tasted words that his pupils had only as yet written or read. The lecture hall was, save for the resonation of the instructor's sagely foreign cadence, alive with the breed of silence that lives in the lungs of hungry intellectuals and the malleable minds of children. The silence was not cumbersome, not heavy. It pirouetted about the room, lilting on the breath of each student and entreating that they cup their ears to better consume the polyphonic song of a world – of Vulcan.

Commander Spock's tact for the language was not uncommon among Vulcan corpus, but few possessed his ability to manipulate the subtleties of lingual play into something beautiful. Perhaps it was the predisposed affinity or the lack of exposure to Vulcan culture that transformed the commander's words into stentorian music, for her. Perhaps not. A hapless smile tugged at her lips as she watched his eyes scour the parchment under the parapet of thick and lofty lashes.

"The _T'Rukhemai_ is a contemporary piece in a body of work that aptly encompasses the concept of inflection to convey intent," he began promptly, compressing his lissome fingers and setting the closed book upon his lectern, "As such, it is required that you read aloud the remainder of the play to its completion, and annotate the proper phonetic transmutations as applicable."

He appeared to contemplate the book's faceless leather cover as the class devolved into a harangue of independent study. His idle hands, fingers splayed, rested pensively upon the tabletop. The commander made pragmatism of his unutilized time, always, and to capture a moment of solitary thought felt intimate, almost invasive. The cadet listlessly withdrew a stylus from her satchel and scrawled notes effortlessly across the surface of her PADD, marring the literature with the monotony of study. Halfheartedly, she contributed to conversations cultivating in her region of the classroom as she divided her attention betwixt work and fraternity. When her eyes meandered back to her commander, he pawed diligently at a PADD of his own from behind the stately bulwark of his desk.

"_Zhel-lan Spokh_," she said. The moment had died but the sound of his voice had yet to settle.

"Cadet Uhura?" he responded immediately, catching her gaze with his own.

She smiled earnestly. "Thank you."

He nodded.

The refraction of the daylight spilling across his eyes resembled something akin to amusement, though his countenance retained an air of dispassion. He returned to his work and she to hers, still misplaced amid a loch of lively bodies, of disaster and catharsis, of disquiet and ambition. The commander's words were gone but the framework remained. She wagered a final glance in his direction, addled by trepidation and excitement in the hopes of finding him captivated by the sharp and meticulous thoughts that surely ran rife within his mind. She hoped to perhaps take away a minute amount of hue from his eye, a cumulative fraction of what he'd let her see between the sheaf of lashes.

She reeled her eyes across the room a final time before devoting herself wholly to her task and found him gazing at her, instead.

Check.

* * *

_T'Rukhemai_: literally "eye of the watcher"; a small moon that orbits Vulcan's sister planet T'Kuht. Used here as the name of a Vulcan play.

_Zhel-lan Spokh_: Commander Spock (with accent for flavor)


End file.
